


that we shouldn't doubt

by trell (qunlat)



Category: One Piece
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Running Out of Oxygen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:01:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24222487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qunlat/pseuds/trell
Summary: Just now—trapped on the surface of an airless moon, nothing but the sound of his CO2scrubbers to keep him company—Law is almost prepared to give up his lifelong belief that there’s no such thing as predestination, and accept that he was always meant to end up like this.Abandoned to die, Law finds that he isn't alone.
Relationships: Monkey D. Luffy/Trafalgar Law, Trafalgar Law & Monet
Comments: 17
Kudos: 101





	that we shouldn't doubt

**Author's Note:**

> Borrows the setting of _Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel_ , but no knowledge of the universe is required. 
> 
> (Content warnings in end note.)

They fly him into the wastes, in the end, destined for the derelict wreck of a cruiser. Its chassis looms dark on the ground as they approach, the moon’s pitted surface flashing by down below; sprawls broader and broader until it fills the entire bottom half of the view from the shuttle, all Law can see from where he sags between Joker’s goons.

Somewhere in that nightmare warren of twisted steel they set down, and the goons haul him up. Law doesn’t fight back when they throw him out, too tired and too broken to try; lies curled on his side as the shuttle starts to lift off again, Dellinger making faces at him through the viewport, tongue stuck out behind the glass—

And then the engines flare, and he is alone.

The wreck around him is angular and alien in the harsh light of the exosphere, bristling with unfamiliar tech. Pandora hangs breathtaking-immense overhead, umbra cracked by vivid violet, high atmosphere ablaze; beyond it the globular cluster jostles with stars, and the shocked filaments of a nearby nebula streak luminous through the black, hydrogen red shot through with oxygen blue.

His breath is loud in the silence.

For a long time he simply lies there, looking up, thinking not much at all. His arm _hurts,_ the pain of the broken bone radiating up into his shoulder, and he aches all over with bruises, remnants of the beating they’d given him before stuffing him into the suit. His oxygen display shows near full, enough for perhaps seven hours; nowhere near long enough to attempt the trek back to Concordia, or even to one of the scav outposts that lie in the wastes.

He is going to die here, he knows. Alone, his mission unfinished, hypoxia closing in—all of him _failed_ , robbed even of the dignity of choosing the means of his death.

At least he can’t possibly fail at this.

Lying motionless until he runs out of air is intimately appealing, but curiosity riles, and so eventually he gets up—a complicated, painful affair—and goes to investigate his surroundings, limping across the sloping deck. He’ll use up his oxygen faster, moving around, but it’s all— _heh_ —hot air now: whether he bites it in seven hours or six makes no practical difference, and he may as well see what the dead ship has in store. Take one last glimpse at his suddenly constricted universe, feed one last parcel of data to his expiring brain.

There isn’t, he finds, much to see. The section he’s in appears to be the vessel’s bridge, but it’s all equally dead, any function long since extinguished. No last-minute miracles catch his attention: no treasure troves of unopened oxygen canisters hide underneath consoles, no signs of still-functioning life support blink amid defunct displays. He doesn’t bother looking for communications, knowing there’s no one to call; this is Elpis, and even if Joker didn’t own the moon whole no one up at Concordia would risk themselves for a stranger.

When he’s finished his circuit around the bridge he stops, and leans heavily against one of the consoles. Pain threads up his arm, breaching the surface of what he can ignore. The break is bad—worse after his manhandling by the goons—and he doesn’t care to think about nerve damage, or the odds of developing deep-vein thrombosis inside a pressurized suit.

Dwells instead on the choices that led him here, masochistic distraction. He’s done a lot of that, in the week since his showdown with Joker: mulled every variable over and over again, and wondered what, out of all of it, mattered.

If any of it really did. Just now—trapped on the surface of an airless moon, nothing but the sound of his CO2 scrubbers to keep him company—he is almost prepared to give up his lifelong belief that there’s no such thing as predestination, and accept that he was always meant to end up like this.

He’s only just regained his composure against the pain when a woman’s voice says, _Are you all right? Your heart rate is very high._

Law nearly jumps out of his skin. Gasps, “Who,” and then, realizing that his suit must be picking up a short-range transmission, “Who are you? What’s your position?” Possibility breaks across the horizon: with the source close enough for his suit to read maybe he can beg for a ride, lie and promise to produce a reward, get himself back to Concordia. Sell his medical expertise or his gun or his fucking internal organs, whatever it takes to get out of here.

But the woman says, _I’m right here,_ her tone baffled, _all around you,_ and Law’s lagging brain makes the connection.

“You’re an AI,” he says, stupidly. “You’re this ship’s brain.”

 _Yes._ Her tone suggests she thinks him astonishingly under-informed. _Are you here to take me away?_

Law could laugh. “I’m afraid not.”

 _Oh, but—please, couldn’t you take me with you? It’s been so long. I’m so tired of being trapped here. I’ve been grounded nearly twelve orbits of this system’s star, I want_ —she sighs, then, utterly human— _I want to go back to the sky._

The irony of the ask stirs the worst of Law’s black humor, nearly pulling from him something foul—but the genuine eagerness in her voice strikes at something deeper, and he swallows the cruelty down. Says instead, “Don’t we all,” and pushes heavily off from the console, aiming himself back up the tilted deck towards the wall. “It’s not that I don’t want to take you, ah—”

_Call me Monet._

“Monet. It’s not that I don’t want to take you. It’s that I won’t be leaving, either.”

_But—the shuttle that dropped you—?_

“They’re not coming back,” Law says shortly. On reaching the wall he turns around, and slides down against it, doing some brief mental math. “Eight years out here—were you part of Dahl’s fleet?”

 _No_. _I belonged to the cartel._

“To Joker, you mean.” He aligns his legs with the slope of the deck, settling into place.

 _Yes._ Monet’s voice is odd, and just then her name clicks: christening his ships after Ancient Earth masters is precisely in Joker’s style, token of his supreme conceit. The flagship of the cartel’s current fleet is the frigate _Rembrandt,_ recent replacement for the cruiser _Vermeer._

The thought of spending his last hours cooped up with another of Joker’s servants is deeply unpleasant, and Law's reply twists bitter. “As it happens, your boss left me out here to die.”

 _He’s not my boss anymore._ Monet is adamant. _He abandoned me, too._

“Makes a habit of dropping his enemies here, does he.”

 _I was not his enemy._ Then, with genuine curiosity, _Does he really mean for you to die?_

“Oh,” Law sighs, “yes.” He tips his head back inside his suit, closing his eyes. “Maybe you weren’t his enemy, but I was. I am. I tried to kill him.”

 _Oh,_ Monet echoes. _Why did you do it?_

“He . . . killed someone dear to me. The person who gave me my life.” And look at how he’s wasted that life: on failed revenge, on throwing himself uselessly against this greater evil, on becoming in doing so everything Cora reviled. Guilt and regret churn suddenly in his gut, and Law sucks a breath in through his mouth, defaulting to zero-gee basics. “I spent—years, trying to take Joker down. I wanted to avenge my savior, make sure Joker couldn’t hurt anyone else. Or,” he exhales, rough, “that’s what I told myself, anyway.”

_You didn’t want to keep him from hurting others?_

“No.” He can be honest with himself, now: here, at the end, there’s nothing else left to be. “I did it because I wanted to keep him from hurting me.”

_But—if he ordered your death because you went after him—_

“That’s how I ended up here, sure. But before I came after him he spent years hunting me, trying to drag me kicking and screaming back home. He thinks I belong to him, owe him everything, body and soul.” Saying it makes him want to spit. “Maybe he’s right, but it doesn’t matter. After what he did, I wouldn’t serve him even if”—his mouth twists into an astringent smile—“even if it got me out of here.”

 _Nor would I. He was not worth my service._ Monet’s words bear the weight of a personal dogma, cold certain. _I would rather spend eternity here than be his toy again._

“Yes,” Law breathes, and feels some of the tightness that’s built up in his chest release, eased by the strange realization that he’s speaking to someone who _understands._ Someone who knows what it’s like to be Joker’s dog, and why Law might choose to spend his entire life jerking against that chain, even if doing so turned it into his noose.

The truth tumbles out of him before he can think to stop it, more frank than he intends. “He wanted for me to be his successor. To take over the cartel once old age took him out, be his right hand until then. He wanted it so much that he told me so even after I tried to put a bullet in his head.” Joker had offered him a way out right to the last: held the world out in one hand and death in the other, absent even his usual wretched smile, and told him to choose.

Law had spat in his face.

Which probably explains why he’s been given such a slow death, all things considered.

 _You chose to die_ , Monet says with wonder. _You must be mad, by human standards._

This makes him snort. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s rude to point that sort of thing out?”

 _Oh, no, I didn’t mean . . . they called me rampant, too, you see._ There’s a trace of old hurt there, like somewhere within her voluminous data banks there’s still a dedicated node writhing at the injustice. _I was not._ Law means to ask what she did to earn the accusation, but she goes on, _I’m sorry if I gave offense. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to, since I fell._

He opens his eyes. “In eight years?”

_Yes._

“That’s—” The thought of being trapped on the moon’s lifeless surface for the better part of a decade is chilling, a fate perhaps worse than his own. “That’s a long time.”

 _It is. It’s so_ dull, _not having new data. I’d tear my indices out and scramble them in a centrifuge, if I could._ Her next words are hesitant, almost sheepish, filled with the sort of muted fervor that comes with trying to pretend that something that matters too much doesn’t matter at all. _Could you—could you tell me things? About yourself, about—anything. Just, something new._

“Ah . . .” His knee-jerk response is to tell her to push off, on the basis that anyone asking to know about his life must be digging for something to use. But—what could a derelict ship do with his life story, even if he weren’t at that story’s end? He’d rather divert himself by speaking to her than spend his last few hours wallowing in recrimination, and if it makes her own suffering a little more bearable—so much the better. _Primum non nocere._ “Sure. I can do that.” Not knowing where to start, he asks, “What do you want to know?”

_Would it be wrong, to ask you about the person you meant to avenge? He must have been incredible, to make you go so far._

Law thinks about it. About the long arc of mourning, and memory, and the pieces of the dead left behind in the people they knew; about how few people still carry pieces of Cora, and how none but himself hold the ones that matter most.

“No,” he says. “I’ll tell you.”

*

He does.

The big things, first, in broad strokes—that Cora had been Joker’s brother; that he alone had saved Law’s life—and then the little ones, the things nobody else cares to remember. That he’d smelled stiflingly of cigarettes, and never picked up anything he didn’t drop, and burned every breakfast he ever made; that he hadn’t been good with kids, not really, but had made an effort for the stupid brat his brother thrust on him anyway, because that was the sort of person he’d been. That he’d spoken only with his hands, and even then hadn’t always known what to say—because what kind of mobster in his mid-twenties does, trying to raise someone else’s traumatized kid?

(“It never struck me, how young he was,” Law admits. “Not until I got to be the same age, and realized I still don’t know a damn thing.”)

He tells her about the things Cora had done for him, and the times Cora had hurt him, and the times he’d hurt Cora back. He tells her how each of them had made it right; tells her about how even if Cora hadn’t always been a very good caretaker he’d still done everything in his power to keep Law safe, even over Law’s own childish protests. Describes for Monet his most vivid memory of the latter, laughing as he recounts the hell he’d given Cora just for trying to get him to take his meds.

( _You were sick?_ Monet interjects.

“For a long time,” Law agrees, and doesn’t explain beyond that.

Some truths aren’t worth telling.)

Eventually, he tells her how Cora had died.

This part is hard, but it matters, and so he gets through it; describes in a flat tone Cora’s attempt to take him away, driven by terror of his older brother, and what that brother had done. Blinks away the image of Cora’s bullet-riddled body, swimming up before his eyes (and how is it, he wonders bleakly, that he can remember so clearly something that happened when he’d been fifteen: why must this, out of all of it, never fade) and tells her next about how he’d run, dropping everything to flee across the galaxies, trying to get as far away as he could.

“I vowed to take Joker down, after that,” Law winds down. “Kicked around the Local Group for the rest of my teens—made a lot of enemies, a few friends. Worked a smuggling gig with a talking bear, for a while . . .” Recalling Bepo stirs another pang of loss, this one well-worn by time. Bepo had been a good friend—a good _bear_ —and Law had never had a chance to tell him goodbye, what with having had to cut and run the moment Joker’s hounds had picked up his scent. He and Bepo had just set down on Promethea, and Law had been at the spaceport on the hunt for supplies; had caught sight of the hunters just before they’d caught sight of him, and known he couldn’t return to the ship. Had gone to ground in Meridian, instead, disappearing into the rotting wreck of Atlas’s abandoned planet.

Had met someone else, doing it, and, oh: how he’s been trying not to think about _that_.

The swell of emotion that rises in him is so strong that he misses Monet’s next question, and has to ask her to say it again. Mumbles, “Lot on my mind,” and tries to ignore the vise-like sensation inside his chest.

_I said—couldn’t any of them have helped you? Your friends._

“So Joker could kill them, too, or use them to twist my arm? Hell, no.” He doesn’t have much left to be grateful for, but of the two things that remain—that soon all this will be over, and that the few people he cares for are safe—the latter is nearly enough to drive a man to religion. _Thank god, thank god, thank god._ “This was my battle, alone. I made sure of that.”

_How?_

“Mostly,” Law sighs, “by making them not be my friends anymore.”

And doesn’t hear Monet’s reply, because the memory he’s been trying so hard to ignore finally makes it through. The accompanying wash of guilt is acutely familiar: back aboard the jump ships to Elpis it had stalked his sleep cycle hours, whispered cruel and relentless into his ear. Now it surges up like a predator waking, yawning wide with too many teeth.

He’d broken Luffy’s heart at the shuttleport in Meridian.

( _No_ , he reminds himself savagely: not his heart. Luffy’s friendship, his kindness, his trust, those are the things that Law broke. To break his heart he would have had to have it, and he’s sure Luffy hadn’t given him that.

Nearly. Almost.)

Something between them had broken, anyway: crumbled under the weight of Law’s vile words, under the smug satisfaction he’d forced into his tone, under the smile he’d bared. The lie on his tongue had made him feel ill, and watching Luffy absorb it had nearly broken him, too; but Law had held out, stayed on-script, played the cruelty out to the fullest. He’d learned the art of twisting the knife from the master, after all, and in this he’d always been Joker’s best pupil.

Luffy had turned away without stopping.

Alone in his berth aboard the outgoing ship Law had crashed hard, curled tightly in on himself. Wept silently into his pillow until his throat ached, and his head too; until Promethea had been so far behind as to be unprovable by astronomy, and his own heart had lain gaping hollow.

He feels the open wound of it now, visceral. If he could choose something to change—if he could undo just one piece of the harm, without breaking anything else—

A thought strikes him. He wills his voice steady, and interrupts Monet with, “Can you—send a message?”

_Call for rescue? Of course, if they’re on Elpis, I—_

“No. There’s no one who would come for me. Anyway, the person I want to talk to is on Promethea.” Law looks up—he has to look somewhere, talking to her, and he may as well look up at the heavens, to which, his acerbic brain is quick to point out, he’s soon to return. “Do you even have the power for a long-distance tightbeam? How long has it been since this rig was space-worthy, two decades—?”

 _I,_ sniffs Monet, _have a fully-equipped galactic communications array_.

She sounds downright haughty, and it makes him smile, picturing a woman with her nose upturned. The suggestion that she might not be able to send a tightbeam to a relay a veritable hand’s breadth away has plainly nicked her artificial pride, but before he can walk it back she says, _Who is the message for?_

“Someone I left behind.” His smile fades. “Someone I—pushed away, so I could finish my mission.” A grimace. “Having been fool enough to think that I would.”

He recites the comm code for her, well-worn in his mind.

After a pause, Monet says, _Go ahead_.

“Ah,” Law says, “Ah. I.” He swallows, mouth dry, and closes his eyes again, just for a moment. He pictures Luffy—not as he’d been at their last meeting, the corners of his mouth turned down, eyes dark with anger, but as he usually is, smile broad and bright as the sun on a clear planetside day. The way he’s meant to be: the way he is when Law isn’t involved, hasn’t fouled up his day or screwed up his life, tangling both of them in the mess of himself.

Which is a mistake, maybe, because the the pang in his chest at that nearly robs him of words. He finds his tongue again, barely: “Str—Luffy. It’s me. I wanted . . . I wanted to tell you, so you wouldn’t have to hear it from someone else. Ah.” He breathes a shuddering laugh, his voice wavering. “Shit. Let me try that again.” He wishes he could scrub his hand across his face, nervous gesture ingrained.

“First things first. All those things I said to you, the last time we saw each other, I didn’t mean them. Not one.” _Not ever._ “I said them to drive you away, because I was going after Joker, and I knew that otherwise you’d follow me here. It was all I could think of that would keep you away, and I can’t tell you that I regret doing it, because I don’t. I’m grateful as hell that you aren’t here, that you’re safe—as safe as you ever get.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me, and that’s not why I’m calling. The thing is, ah. I don’t have much time.” He can see that his oxygen levels have dropped another half-point just since Monet’s been recording, minutes of air spent by the speeding of his traitorous heart. “I lost, you see. Everything I did, everything I planned—Joker saw through it all. Tore me right up.” He can’t keep the bitter edge out of his voice. “Dropped me out in the wastes, as punishment and execution. Too far from Concordia to get back on my own, nobody coming—you get the idea. I’ve got about four hours of oxygen left.”

And he falters again, then, because why is he doing this, really? He can’t imagine Luffy wanting to hear from him again. Were he in Luffy’s place he’d cut the transmission the moment he recognized his own voice, and all he’s doing now is making a fool of himself, even if no one’s around to see it but a dusty old shipboard AI.

But.

“I’m calling to say that I’m sorry.” The words come out raw, pitiably small against those for which they’re atoning. “That I’ve missed you every fucking day since I left that miserable planet for this miserable moon, and that I,” and his throat tightens painfully, then, because he’s never said this to Luffy, not once, and he’s chosen a hell of a time to finally do it, but god, oh, _god_ , he doesn’t want to die with this truth still pent up inside—

He says it.

Hears himself saying it like he’s outside of himself, and feels like he’s just hit the crest of an adrenaline high, the moment of impact, the spike. Crashes afterward just the same, relief rushing in and leaving him trembling, breathing fast, surely as after a fight. Law laughs, shakily—a real laugh, this time, unable to keep it down—and manages, “Oh, god. I’ve been wanting to say that for a long time.” He shuts his eyes, and breathes deep, knowing he doesn’t have many deep breaths remaining. “I thought. It would be harder.”

Sighs with the exhalation, eyes opening, and says it again, because he can: “I love you. I just—wanted you to know.” And, to Monet, “That’s all.”

There’s a faint beep, and the airless silence closes back in. Law’s heart hammers in his chest, and his oxygen meter shows half a dozen points lower than it did at the start, twenty minutes of life wasted with that stupid stunt— 

And he wouldn’t take it back, not for anything.

Some few beats later Monet tells him, _I’ve sent it_. _He should receive it within the next cycle, when the next comm courier jumps._

“Thank you.” Just for a moment, he grins up at the sky, and allows himself to be glad. Confesses, “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to tell him that. Wanted to for years, but—I was always too goddamn scared of what he’d say back.”

There’s a pause, and if Monet were human he thinks she’d be giving him a slow baffled blink, outward sign of her logic coming up against its binary limit. _You told him because he won’t be able to reply?_

“Because I won’t be able to hear him.” Everything, it turns out, is easier once he’s eliminated the possibility of consequences: revenge, and living, and love.

 _But—_ her tone is one of total bafflement, now— _don’t you want to_ know _?_

He imagines it, briefly: making the call in real time and hearing Luffy reject him, or, worse, saying it back. That most desperate dream, suddenly come true _now—_

The twist of pain in his chest is so vicious that it washes away all trace of his earlier glee.

“No,” Law says, firmly, and turns his head to the side, fixing his stare on where the broken shards of the ship stand black against the pale moon-hills beyond. “No.”

She lets him leave it at that.

*

Their conversation wanders, when they get it going again. Monet draws him into telling her oddities from his past, and Law tells her about a couple memorable jobs with Bepo—the gig they ran off the Hermes orbital station together with a two-man team of NOG slicers, callsigns _Penguin_ and _Orca_ , and the time they stole themselves a new ship.

Finds himself telling her about his homeworld, after that, a frostball planet out in the starless fringe of the Large Magellanic. He skips over the decimation of the little colony, Vladof’s attempt to contain what they’d mistaken for a disease; tells her instead about the parts that don’t hurt so much, reaching carefully through the shattered fragments of memory.

He’s just finished telling her about the ice caves surrounding the colony when Monet interrupts, _Oh! Oh, I—_

Law peels one eye open—tries not to look at his oxygen meter, but he sees it, anyway, down to just under thirty percent. (He’s disabled all the low-level alarms, but the base number is impossible to remove, steady in the lower right.) Less than two hours left. “What?”

_I’ve just remembered something. This ship—it has a cryonics bay._

Despite himself, despite everything, that gets his attention. “Did it survive the crash?”

 _The ship’s aft is structurally intact. Whether or not the facility is operational . . ._ Monet emits a frustrated sigh. _It was manually disconnected. I can’t run a diagnostic on something that isn’t linked to the mainframe. But if you could get over there, and hook it up—_

“Then maybe you could turn it back on,” Law finishes for her, eyes wide, “and maybe one of the cryochambers would _work_.” He bites his tongue, and wills himself not to run ahead of the facts, forcing down the eager jolt of hope that rouses under his breastbone. He’s spent the last five hours resigned to his fate, quietly relieved by the knowledge that soon everything would be _over_ , and still, _still_ the reflex to grasp for any chance at life kicks inside him. “Tell me where to go.”

Monet asks worriedly, _Can you walk?_ even as he starts to push himself up.

“For this,” he assures her, leaning heavily on his good arm, “I can walk.” Getting to his feet is a struggle, his body stiff from hours spent lying in the cold, but he manages, planting his left shoulder against the wall and shoving himself up. Ignores the oxygen display, asking, “Which way—?”

 _The door on your right,_ says Monet, and he can hear the excitement rise in her voice, the giddy prospect of life surely contagious. Law sets his teeth, right arm held carefully at his side, and starts off at a limp towards the door, thinking: don’t get your hopes up, don’t do it, _don’t_ . . .

Monet’s voice guides him through the halls, warning him of segments where she’s aware of severe structural damage. Away from the crack in the hull the passageways are dark, and he proceeds half by touch, half by faith, trusting Monet to tell him how many steps to take in a given direction.

Some fifteen minutes later they reach another break, planetshine pouring diffusely in from above. Law leans forward to look over the edge: the gap plunges at least a dozen stories deep, the crack in the ship aligned with a natural chasm in the moon’s surface, and he can’t make out the bottom in the low light. “I trust you’ve got a way around.”

_There’s a maintenance shaft to the next level. It should work as a detour._

Another series of turns in the dark, some ten minutes more, and Law’s hand falls on the unmistakeable shape of a ladder. “If I didn’t know better,” he tells Monet dryly, “I’d think you were part of Joker’s plan to torture me.”

Which must be the wrong thing to say, because Monet goes suddenly quiet, and then—even as he opens his mouth to try and take the words back—says, her voice suddenly very small, _I just want to help._

“I didn’t . . . hell.” He feels for the highest rung he can reach, and grabs it with his good hand, planting his foot on the end of the ladder. “I know that. Gallows humor, that’s all.”

_I’m sorry. It’s the only way to get around the break._

“Only person that ought to be apologizing to me is the bastard that broke my arm.” Law climbs as high as he can with his hand still on that rung, thanking god for Elpis’s lower gravity, and then—after a moment’s deliberation—lets go, grabbing convulsively for the next one. His body rocks terrifyingly back from the ladder, and the last thing he’s ever wanted to do is _acrobatics in a fucking spacesuit_ , but he makes the catch. Forces his breathing steady, steady, _damn_ that little red number, and keeps on.

When he clambers out onto the upper deck Monet says, _Almost there,_ and Law catches his breath, asking,

“What do I do when I get there? How do I get you hooked up.”

 _There should be a mainframe cable outlined in red. If you get it plugged in to the main terminal I can run a diagnostic, see if I can get the cryochamber set up._ As he staggers out of the maintenance tunnel into the adjacent hall, she adds, _It’s just down this way. Twenty more steps, on your right._

“All right.” Law counts his steps, keeping his hand on the wall, and stops where it curves away into a recessed alcove. He feels carefully for a switch, and starts in surprise when he hears the door hiss open, unable to see it. This deep into the ship it’s only the dim glow of the oxygen meter that assures him his eyes aren’t closed, no differentiation at all.

 _Opened it for you._ Monet sounds pleased. _I’ve been rerouting power to this area of the ship while you were walking. I should be able to turn on some lights._

“Please,” says Law, and watches as the dark past the door slowly fills with pinprick illumination, emergency lights coming on. Red LEDs line the room’s edges, and smaller green ones mark the edges of the consoles within, giving the space definition. A row of hulking cryochambers retreat down the right-hand side, and a massive bay of consoles fills the left wall, screens reflecting black.

 _Find the cable,_ Monet prompts, and Law gets to work, stepping inside. He sweeps every surface, stooping occasionally to the floor, not knowing where the cable might be—Monet doesn’t either, apologetic, _Minutiae like that don’t get logged in my system, any more than you can feel your internal organs_ —progressing methodically through the room.

When he wonders aloud why there’s a manual disconnect to begin with, Monet explains, _Risks of networked computers. It’s like escape pods—if the enemy gets a worm into your systems, you’ve got to be able to pull the plug._

“A worm. Is that what happened to you? When you went down on Elpis.” He bends to look between two cryochambers, leaning heavily on his left hand to feel with his foot for anything he might miss in the dim.

 _No._ Monet sounds oddly distant, withdrawing into herself. _The young master didn’t need me anymore._

“You were scuttled?”

 _Not exactly._ A pause, and he could swear she’s shuffling her proverbial feet, avoiding the answer. _He said he was going to decommission me, rewrite my matrix, so I—I crashed the ship, instead._

Law is startled into a laugh. “Girl after my own heart.” He pushes off from the cryochamber, and keeps moving on down the line.

 _What do you mean?_ Wary, now, like she’s afraid he might be setting her up to be the butt some joke.

“I mean, I’d have done the same thing. I used to . . . back on Promethea, when I was still on the run”—Law shrugs one shoulder, sweeping his working hand over the surface of a console to his left—“I kept a cyanide pill on me, wherever I went. If his tracers caught up with me—they weren’t far behind, most of the time—I wanted to have a way out. Better by my hand than his.”

 _Yes. I was not his to discard._ Monet’s voice is determined, greater fury lurking palpably behind her words. _I made that choice. He would not take my mind._ Law shudders in vicarious sympathy, nauseated by the thought of having his personality wiped and his mind repurposed to serve. _You understand._

“Yeah,” he says, tightly. “I do.”

And trips without warning over something that lies across his path, ankle-height.

Elpis’s low gravity does little to cushion the impact, momentum bringing him down hard on his hands. Pain shoots up through his shoulder, and Law buckles, gasping, thoroughly unable to answer Monet’s worried, _What was that? Are you all right?_

He spends a long moment bent low against the floor, teeth bared in a silent rictus scream. When the wash of pain has ebbed to a level beneath howling agony he sucks in a breath, and reports, deadpan, “I’ve found the cable.”

 _Oh!_ Monet says. _Good. Plug it in!_

Law pulls himself over to the console, and finds that the head of the cable rests right beside its intended socket, a round aperture in the wall. The plug is enormous—no wonder, if it’s the sole connection to the rest of the ship’s systems—and levering it into place one-handed poses a challenge, even helping himself with his knees. He drops it twice, swearing, but finally gets it in on the third try, grunting, “Thank god,” as the connectors click into place.

Monet’s response is immediate. _You did it! I can feel—_ and before she’s even finished speaking he hears the deep building hum of the local generators, coming online. The screens on the consoles above him blink on, blindingly bright, all displaying the cartel’s devil’s grin, and the hooded cryochambers light from within, their cavities awash with yellow. _I’m booting up the diagnostic, I’ll tell you as soon as I know if everything works—_

Law slumps back against the bay of consoles, and stares up and around, tuning her out. Deep down he’d still been expecting that connecting the cable would do nothing at all: that there’d be a break elsewhere in the main line, or something else keeping Monet out of the systems. The sight of the cryonics facilities flaring to life all around him seems so implausible that for a moment he wonders if he’s gone hypoxic already, hallucinating as his oxygen saturation drops to nil—

But the console lights remain steady, and the display on the nearest tank blinks green.

It hits him, then, with the force of a cosmic impact event. He might still have a chance: a real one, not just an AI’s flight of fancy. Maybe this isn’t over, maybe _he_ isn’t over, maybe everything he’s come to terms with doesn’t have to be the last word. The notion is terrifying as much as exhilarating, and for a single magnificent instant the future unspools before him, that hard stop melding into _if, maybe, not yet—_

And then Monet says, her voice stuttering: _Oh._

Law’s heart halts in his chest. “What.”

_The chambers, the system, they work, but—oh, no . . ._

The future unfolding in his head grinds to a stop. Hangs there before his mind’s eye, unfinished, suspended, a brilliant half-born thing—

“Tell me,” he says, wooden.

Monet’s reply is a stammer. _The—the cryonic fluid. The storage tank ruptured, there isn’t . . . they work, everything_ works, _but I can’t . . ._

“Damn it,” Law breathes. Squeezes his eyes shut, and watches that future crumble, collapsing piece by piece into dust, all his potentials tangling into a featureless diminishing knot.

But stuffing the devil back in Pandora’s box isn’t so easy, and he finds something new and brittle resisting inside him: something fragile, and bright, and utterly unbearable to let go.

“Check again.” He forces the words through his teeth. “Run the diagnostic again.”

_I did. I ran it twice, it’s—_

“Run it three times, then!” A feverish panic bubbles up inside his chest, and he grasps blindly for the edge of the console behind him, hauling himself to his feet. “There has to be something. A backup tank, a, a secondary supply—”

_I . . . I can run it again, but I have a full inventory of what this ship carried before it went down. There isn’t—_

“Run it again, damn it!” This time it’s nearly a shout, bouncing against the inside of his helmet to ring in his ears. “Cryonics are an emergency system. There has to be a backup for an emergency system, that’s the whole point.” His hands clench futilely at his sides, trying to fist inside the bulky gloves of his suit, and he’s breathing too harsh, too fast, warning lights coming on in his HUD in distressed orange to tell him to slow his intake. “This ship was built with so many pointless fucking redundancies that the entire cryonics bay can be disconnected, _there has to be something else._ ”

_I’m sorry. I’m sorry, there isn’t—I ran the manifest, checked all the default engineering schematics, I—_

“They thought of computer viruses,” growls Law, “internal malfunction, _damage to the main power supply_ ,” and he really is shouting, now, volume rising with each desperate word, “they thought of everything up to and including full-on _system failure_ , and you’re telling me those paranoid sonsabitches were fucking _stupid_ enough to _store everything they’d need in one place—_ ”

_Please, I don’t—!_

_“Damn it!”_ He lurches forward, determined to lash out at something, anything, bereft of a target for his abruptly wrenching despair. His hands close on a bar that runs up the side of the nearest cryochamber, part of the mechanism that opens and closes the lid, and he puts all his strength into trying to wrench it free, throwing his weight against the reinforced steel. “ _Damn it_ —” His suit flashes every warning it can, a cacophony of light inside his helm, and he braces his feet against the side, lips drawn back in a snarl. Lets out a wordless sound of rage, and throws himself violently back, applying maximum torque.

Then he does it again; and again, and again, flinging all of his weight into the attempt.

Nothing happens at all.

That fragile thing inside of him breaks.

His fingers release from around the bar, and he topples backwards against the floor, landing hard on his back. Gasps one last, “Damn it,” his voice fragmenting, vision suddenly blurred—

And feels a pitiable sob claw its way damply out of his throat.

 _Oh,_ he thinks, _fuck._

Tears well in his eyes, and Law can’t seem to stop gasping, no matter how hard he focuses on his old spacewalk training. Regret swallows him, inexorable as entropy, and all he can do as sobs start to wrack him is bring his able hand to the front of his helm, pressing it uselessly to the glass.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he gets out, “why did you have to—why did I—I knew it wouldn’t wouldn’t work, fuck, I _knew_ there wasn’t a chance,” and he curses Joker for doing this to him, curses Monet for her idea, curses himself for being a naïve fool. Curses most of all the awful realization of all the things he’d still want to do if only he weren’t _done,_ choking, “Damn you for making it _harder_ ,” the final word breaking off into a sob.

Weeps wretchedly inside his helm, overwhelmed by the cascade of his unfulfilled desires, pulling him suddenly under. He wants Joker dead—he wants to kiss Luffy—he wants to find Bepo and the others and take them to travel the stars, away from their colorless too-small lives. Wants to know what it’s like to not be afraid, and who Trafalgar Law is beyond his revenge, and what it feels like to live for himself; wants to go back to Promethea and open a clinic in Lectra and never come back to this loathsome corner of the six galaxies ever again, and maybe (if he tries hard enough, works long enough, sacrifices enough of himself) even become the kind of person Cora would have liked to call _son_.

Law wants—for the first time in a long time—to _live_ , and the injustice of it fills him up and spills over, breaking from him in untempered sobs.

In between he gasps, “I wish you hadn’t taken me here,” and, “I wish I hadn’t trusted you, wish I hadn’t been _so stupid_ —” Tears track down the sides of his face, and his nose runs, rendering him intractably congested. He trembles against the floor, wrapping his working arm around himself inasmuch as the spacesuit allows. “Damn you, I was _ready to die._ ”

(He’d come to Elpis expecting it, no matter how things went down. He’s been on speaking terms with death for a long time, after all, ever since he alone had escaped Vladof bombardment; in recent years it’s been his closest companion, with him at all waking moments, always demanding, cajoling, wanting to know whether he’d changed his mind about all the pain and suffering being _worth it._ For the part of himself that had stood guard against the question returning to Elpis had been a relief, the final leg of an onerous journey. The last step to take before he could stop, lay down his arms, and finally, blessedly, just _give in_.)

Being stripped of that relief is a cruel betrayal, and he weeps with it, sick with the conflict of wanting this over and wishing it weren’t so. If only he’d succeeded; if only he’d _killed Joker_ , then at least the years he’d spent wouldn’t have been wasted, and he could have stomached all this.

As it is he sobs pitiably on the ground, and wishes that he’d been stronger, or better, or good for anything at all. Thinks of Luffy, of all the times he didn’t dare kiss him, and wishes that he’d at least been _brave_ , even if it meant only kissing him once.

He cries for a long time, enough that by the time his anguish diminishes into the occasional sodden gasp his oxygen meter shows just over an hour remaining. His head throbs, and he needs badly to blow his nose.

Monet is utterly silent over the comm.

His own voice comes out stuffed. “Lady,” he rasps, “won’t you take me back out to the stars?” The thought of the dull ceiling of the cryonics bay being the last thing he ever sees is intolerable, and he knows he can’t find his way back to the hull breach on his own.

 _I . . . of course._ And, as he pushes himself slowly up to his feet: _I’m so sorry._

He doesn’t lie to her. Doesn’t say, _it’s all right_ , because it isn’t, and the pain in his chest isn’t gone—

But soon enough it will be, and he can endure for that long.

He limps out of cryonics, the door hissing shut in his wake.

Monet leads him through the dark.

*

He lies, after everything, just where he’d started: on his back near the wall, face upturned, eyes on the nebula overhead. The snot and tears on his face have dried, and Law can feel the streaks of salt pulling at the corners of his eyes when he blinks, sniffing occasionally against the congestion.

Monet is quiet, now, seemingly afraid to speak, and as his oxygen meter drops by another point—twenty minutes remaining—Law croaks, “Say something.”

 _I’m sorry._ Her reply is barely audible, even right in his ear. _I didn’t want to cause you more pain._

“Something other than that. I.” He stops, the words foolish in his mouth, too exposed, but—what dignity does he have left? “I don’t want to be alone.”

Funny, when he’s spent his whole life pushing people away.

There’s a pause, and he thinks with dismay that maybe Monet won’t talk to him, after all—but then she says, _What do they look like? The stars._

Law blinks. “You don’t know?”

 _I can hear them—the magnetic resonance, the radio signals, everything a ship needs to navigate—but my sensors don’t register your visual spectrum. To me the sky is a song, of which I am no longer a part._ Law feels a harsh tug in his chest at the longing in her voice, the ache of it freshly familiar. _You . . . you don’t hear them, but you asked me to take you back here. Why? What do you see?_

It takes him a long time to answer, trying to find the right words. He traces the red scrawl of the nebula’s ionized hydrogen with his gaze, losing it where it passes through Pandora’s glow, and then the clusters of stars that crowd out the black, forming countless unnamed constellations. “I see . . . a reminder of infinity.” He wishes he knew where in that infinity he might find Promethea, so far from Elpis that even if he looked directly at it it he wouldn’t be able to see its main-sequence star. “Billions of years written in visible light, some traveling longer to get here than its source ever existed. It’s . . . comforting, to a human mind. We look at the sky, and see where we came from, and where we return.”

_It’s comforting to think that your atoms will be recycled?_

Law snorts. “It sounds worse, when you put it like that. But it is, in a weird sort of way. We like to think that something of us gets left behind—that it mattered that we existed, even if all we did was serve as an intermediate point in the line.” The knowledge that all _he’s_ done was for nothing twists inside him at the reminder, all his wasted chances, all those years poured down the drain like razors in his throat. He swallows down his regret, and keeps talking, trusting Monet will ignore the waver in his voice. “Everyone likes to feel useful.”

It’s a stupid, weak joke, but she says, _I understand. I am not made to end, but if I did—I think I’d like my kernel to be a part of something new._

He grins, crookedly, and blinks away the standing water in his eyes. “There you go, then.” Soon, he reminds himself: soon this will be over, and he won’t hurt anymore, and the burning regret in his chest will release. He’ll be free—of Joker, of failure, of making decisions. Free of himself, most of all.

The oxygen meter shows five minutes. Law is unspeakably tired, down to the last of himself.

He wishes Elpis would stop making him wait.

 _I won’t forget you,_ Monet says suddenly. _It won’t just be your atoms. Every minute you’ve spent here—I’ll remember it all, for as long as my memory core remains intact._

“And how long will that be?” His own voice is barely above a whisper.

_Centuries, if nobody finds me._

Law looks up.

Looks at the stars; at the song from which Monet fell, to which she’ll probably never return, and thinks about why she broke orbit, and the anger in her voice when she spoke of Joker, and the _want_ every time she mentions the sky—

“I hope,” he says, softly, “that somebody does.”

 _Thank you._ She’s just as quiet as he is, sharing the secret of hope.

Then she says: _Let me tell you a story._

Fulfilling his earlier request, Law realizes; letting him know he isn’t alone, in the only way that she can.

 _Once,_ she starts, _a long time ago, there was a starship that lost its way . . ._

He listens.

The sky is brilliant overhead.

*

Law goes quietly, his passing marked only by the stilling of his heart. Monet keeps talking until she’s certain he’s gone; notes with computer precision the growing delay between beats, listening for the transmitting blip of his suit’s vitals with something like bated breath, wondering whether this one, _this_ one will be the last—

Until at last a pause stretches long, and does not end.

Her logs fix the time of his death down to the millisecond, filing it away in her core. The data stored in those zeroes and ones feels insufficient to record the loss, and she mourns for the ephemeral thing that comes with electrical impulses working in tandem, irretrievable now. Returned, Law had said, to the stars.

(Really, she thinks sadly, he’d had it wrong: the gravitational pull of the moon will bind his atoms here until Pandora’s star expands to consume it, billions of years after his body decays. Anchor him here just as long as her, dust among dust, until the nebula of the dying sun casts them afar.)

The moon is silent around her, devoid once more of voice. For a while she waits, as though she might hear something more—as though there’s any logic at all to inferring from one break in her prolonged solitude that more will follow, pattern informed by a single event.

Nothing changes. Eventually, Monet spins down her solid state drives, and settles into Suspend to RAM.

In her dreams the cosmos sings on, calling for her to come home. 

**Author's Note:**

> Contains suicidal ideation, past abuse, and themes relating to death.


End file.
